Automated Price Updating Plug-In / Extension

[Rob Cook]

Hey to All

This is the first post I've done to this forum - I'm excited to have found it and hope to learn and contribute as much as possible.

I'm a freelancer/consultant with a client who produces a large catalog with about 7500 sku's in it that need to have pricing updated annually. To this point we've used the PriceLynx extension in an old Quark protocol on an old Mac system with a goal of updating to latest/greatest Mac system (CS3 or Quark on a MacPro) at the appropriate time. Part of the reason we stayed with the old Quark is that PriceLynx doesn't work on Quark5 or newer and our system in place did the job (if it ain't broke, ...).

There is consideration of integrating catalog and web by way of look and feel using the new, proposed system. Further, it seemed the newer, integrated systems like CS2.3 would allow many efficiencies in the production of catalog and web work since much of the work produced on one side (print) could be deployed promptly elsewhere (web). It seemed that Adobe's CS2.3 would work except that it won't run on Intel; Adobe's CS3 works on Intel chips but has dropped GoLive in favor of DreamWeaver, apparently because GoLive never will work on Intel chips. Yesterday I learned that a pricing module being considered (AutoPrice) is still under development for CS3, but works on CS2.3. Another being considered (DataLinker) is apparently in the same situation, though I can't be sure as they do not list a phone number.

Has anyone had any experience with the above price updaters or perhaps able to provide information on an updater that works with CS3 or Quark 7?

Thanks for your consideration.

Rob Cook
Spartanburg, South Carolina

[roaryg]

Haven't used those softwares, but one thought: if your data is in excel (where its easy to update a lot of numbers at once), you can use the datamerge feature in InDesign to create your price lists. You can set this up so that the prices will stay linked to your original source file (most likely a tab-delimited text file exported from excel).